Why do clever people believe stupid things? It’s difficult to make sense of the world from the small atoms of experience that we each gather as we wander around it, and a new paper in the British Journal of Psychology this month shows how we can create illusions of causality, much like visual illusions, if we manipulate the cues and clues we present.
They go on to describe an experiment demonstrating the traps of cause and effect. It’s a pretty interesting read.
One series of studies has shown that if you manipulate someone to make them feel powerful (through memories of a situation in which they were powerful, for example), they imagine themselves to have even greater control over outcomes that are still purely determined by chance, which perhaps goes some way to explaining the hubris of the great and the good.
We know about optical illusions and the ways in which our eyes can be misled. It would be nice if we could also be wary of cognitive illusions that affect our reasoning apparatus, but like the “close door” buttons in a lift – which, it turns out, are often connected to nothing at all – these illusions are modern curios.
Barack Obama – The Curio President. By the way, I’ve often suspected those buttons didn’t really do anything.
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